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The unsung history of the fight to end the tax on tampons

In the battle over whether tampons should be taxed as “luxury” goods, no government comes out clean.

On Monday, the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion brought forward by NDP MP Irene Mathyssen to end the sales tax on feminine hygiene products. While the motion carries no policy weight, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has vowed to introduce the tax exemptions in the next budget.

“And it’s long past time when women’s needs should be taken into account,” Mathyssen said.

But the fight to end the tax on tampons has been waged both federally and provincially for decades, and the sluggish pace of progress is perceived by some to be an indicator of the way women’s issues are often shunted aside in politics.

Jill Piebiak, a feminist activist and organizer whose petition on Change.org for “No Tax on Tampons” got about 73,000 signatures, says women’s menstruation is often just not a priority.

“People are just generally fed up with the thought that the government can make money off of the biology of 50 per cent of the population.”

According to Piebiak, feminine hygiene products bring in $36.4 million a year in federal tax revenue — revenue raised by charging 18 million Canadian women for menstruating.

Mathyssen isn’t the first to put her name besides the private member’s bill to end taxes on feminine hygiene products. She inherited it from Judy Wasylycia-Leis, who first introduced the bill in 2004 after Ontario NDP MPP Marilyn Churley asked the federal government to end the tax.

“It’s taken a long time,” Wasylycia-Leis said. “But I think persistence can pay off if we work at an issue long enough that is just and right and deserving of attention.”

Wasylycia-Leis said that as a feminist and a politician, she felt compelled to push the issue forward.

“I saw it as a gender-based tax,” she said. “It was to me a discrimination against women.”

Although feedback from her fellow MPs was largely supportive, there were a few who just didn’t get it, Wasylycia-Leis said, with some even comparing the tax on tampons to a tax on shaving cream.

“Some simplistic, some naïve some sort of facile and silly responses happened off the record,” she said.

Private members’ bills are notoriously hard to get on the agenda, but Wasylycia-Leis kept on introducing it, in the hopes that the government would “grab the idea and run with it.”

Instead, the bill wallowed in parliamentary limbo for 11 years. By the time Wasylycia-Leis retired from federal politics in 2010, it had taken on three different iterations but had never got beyond its first introduction in the House of Commons.

More than two decades before Wasylycia-Leis introduced her bill in parliament, the fight to end the tax on tampons came to Ontario. In 1982, then-finance minister Frank Miller introduced a slew of exemptions to Ontario’s sales tax — but tampons weren’t among them.

Sheila Copps, a Liberal MPP at the time, said women were so incensed they mailed bloody tampons to Miller’s office.

“That was quite the time,” she said. “There was a huge public outcry.”

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As the only woman in the Liberal caucus, Copps became the de-facto spokeswoman for tax-free tampons. At just 30 years old, Copps was a savvy choice to pit against the middle-aged and old-fashioned Miller, who came across as rather foolish.

“He used to wear these suits that looked like something out of the Honeymooners,” she said.

In one exchange, Miller tried to compare tampons to automobiles, which were essential for transportation but nonetheless taxable.

The comparison did not go over well with Copps.

The tampon tax debate in 1982

Miller would go on to become premier, but his tenure did not even last six months.

“I think the tampons did actually play a roll in it,” Copps said.

“His own persona as a very old-fashioned, Father Knows Best kind of guy . . . that was kind of their kiss of death.”

Not long after he left office in 1985, the newly elected Liberal premier David Peterson introduced an exemption for feminine hygiene products into the budget and the items have been tax free in Ontario ever since.

It’s still unclear when the federal tax on tampons will end. Mathysson said she’s pleased the issue has support from all parties, but thinks that “next budget” isn’t soon enough for women, especially given the political chaos of the impending election.

“I don’t think they’ve taken women and our equality issues seriously, and I think that goes for previous governments as well,” Mathyssen said.

But for Wasylycia-Leis, who will not have the chance to vote on the bill she originally introduced, the success of the motion is a sign of promise.

“There’s much more sensitivity to the issue and an understanding that it truly is a sexist provision ingrained in our taxation policy and in this day and age there’s no room for that.”

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